Of Treacheries, Tykes, and the Trinity

The twentieth century has been a brutal century. It is the only century which has had the dubious honour of exterminating the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings because of ideology. Much of the blame for this brutality found its impetus in Social Darwinism, a view which applied biological evolution to social evolution. The former is concerned with the evolution of species through the mutation of genes, while the latter is concerned with the evolution of society through “optimal natural means.” The Social Darwinists of the early twentieth century agreed that the ‘problem’ with society was its theistic and Judeo-Christian principles which favoured the inalienable rights of each person over the Darwinian belief in utilitarianism — which espoused the greatest good for the greatest number.

These modernist thinkers believed society should borrow the concepts of biological Darwinism to solve societal problems by imposing the process of natural selection on the socially inept. Of course, unlike its biological sister, the facilitation in Social Darwinism would be the State rather than nature, which would ensure, through legislative measures, that the biological product would evolve as planned. Ironically, however, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) did not understand how his biological theory could be applied to the social and political arenas, but that did not seem to bother German social and political Darwinists, including Karl Marx, from doing so. Darwinism became a convenient and predominant vehicle for monopolistic and exploitive individuals to advance their agendas in all spheres of human society — science, academia, politics and business.

Treacheries

The underlying principle in Social Darwinism is, of course, the belief in eugenics. The first person to broach the subject was Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), whose opinions provided the precursor to Social Darwinism in the twentieth century. Malthus posited that the ‘breeding habits of the lower classes of society’ would cause overpopulation, and therefore would threaten the food supply. He believed that draconian measures were necessary to curb the population growth by denying the poor all charity, therefore forcing them to curb their ‘breeding habits’. (Of course, the idea of food scarcity due to alleged overpopulation is a myth, and science itself has exposed that myth many times over. Roger Revelle, former director of the Harvard Center for Population Studies, estimated that world agricultural resources are capable of providing an adequate diet for 40 billion people while underdeveloped countries alone are capable of feeding 18 billion people.)

If Thomas Malthus was the “father” of eugenics and population control, the “mother” of the movement was Margaret Sanger, the admitted racist and founder of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Her contemporaries included many academic elite who were part of a number of “International Congresses of Eugenics”. Winston Churchill, himself, was vice president of the First Congress in London in 1912. The third international congress in 1932 included a call for the sterilization of 14 million Americans with “low intelligence-test scores.”

As a vigilant promoter of eugenics, Sanger recommended “a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” Her counterpart in Britain, Marie Stopes, preferred a decidedly less diplomatic assessment: “…society allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the community, to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, and inferior babies.” Of course, Margaret Sanger was not known for sugar coating her words unlike many contemporaries of the great society. The devout atheist would have made the Nazis blush. She had little respect for the democratic process, decrying that “a moron’s vote [is] as good as the vote of a genius.”

Sanger and her collaborators set the stage for the current war on the population by the United Nations. The U.N. initiated a number of population and development conferences, beginning in Rome in 1954. The second conference was held in Belgrade in 1965. Unlike the Rome conference, fertility was viewed as a policy variable in Belgrade, representing a seismic shift within the framework of the fertility issue. At the Rome conference, family size was accepted as a basic human right to be exercised within the family. In Belgrade, on the other hand, parental rights to decide the question of family size was to be influenced within “social and international context.”

The third international U.N. World Population Conference was held in Bucharest in 1974, and produced an activist agenda. The conference made evident the widening polarization between the first and third worlds. Industrialized countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and others saw population as an impediment to the development of the third world, while governments of the poorer countries viewed population growth as a consequence rather than the cause of impediments to development. Of course, the rationales of the wealthier nations were surely vicarious — the real issue was their control of the underdeveloped nations, which population growth threatened. If population control was not checked quickly, the existing world economic Goliaths might lose their privileged position by forfeiting their control of poorer countries’ natural and human resources.

The Population Controllers were impeded somewhat during the Mexico City conference in 1984. In this conference, thanks to the policies of the Reagan administration, the Unites States voiced serious concerns regarding human rights violations, specifically insisting that abortion not be utilized as a method of family planning. The Population Controllers were not amused. During the Cairo conference in 1994, the vehicle chosen to carry population control requirements was euphemistically called “women’s empowerment” — the code phrase ideology underlying feminist movement in the West. Needless to say, many of the developing countries’ delegates resented the push for universal access to “safe and legal abortion” which they believed, among other points, to threaten their national sovereignty. They rightly pointed out that population growth was needed in order to develop their resources — which naturally threatened the West’s current control. Of course, the Copenhagen and Beijing conferences in 1995, the Istanbul conference in 1996, and the Rome conference on Food in 1997 all helped to accelerate the exceedingly aggressive U.N. feminist agenda. The war was over code words and euphemisms such as “sustainable development” (i.e. zero population), and “reproductive health services” (i.e. abortions and contraceptives).

In fact, the world population is indeed in crisis, but it is not one of overpopulation but rather one of underpopulation. In fact, the G-7 countries (U.S., Canada, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, and Germany) along with at least 79 other nations have fertility rates well below the mere replacement level (2.2 children per couple) for a population. The industrialized world is dying, and this is a major crisis that has been purposely ignored by state planners. Take a good, long look at Canada’s growing ageing population and then look at the economics of trying to support them with a dismal fertility rate of 1.5 children per couple. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to realize there is going to be an interesting paradox in Canada in a few years, namely, remaining a “progressive,” contraceptive nation while having to recognize and admit to the serious underpopulation problem in the country.

Readers may recall that immigration is a very important issue to the Parti Quebecois in Quebec. Ever wonder why? Well, the population growth rate of Quebec was 0.8 children per couple just a few years ago, well under the replacement level of 2.2. If you want to preserve the French language in Quebec and your own people have an abysmal fertility rate, then immigration becomes an important area to control and wrestle away from the Federal government. To control immigration is to control the future of your language and culture. It is the pinnacle of irony that the contraceptive ideology that Quebec embraced during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960’s is the very instrument that is preventing it from accomplishing its political, secessionist goals. Indeed, the pill has done more to quash nationalism than any Federalist could ever do. The fact that Quebec politicians have been so absurdly blind to this reality may be more due to design than to chance.

The world has been exposed to the “culture of death” for over thirty years. And what has been the result? It is unnecessary to go any further than the very prophetic but ignored encyclical of Pope Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life) released in July, 1968. This encyclical is, in my opinion, the most important non-inspired document ever written by human hands. I wish to quote it at some length here simply because it describes the situation today so eerily well:

Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the Church in this field is based, if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificial birth control. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men – especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point — have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anticonceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as an instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.

Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies. Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem? Who will stop rulers from favouring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy”(Humanae Vitae, 17).

There are a number of passages in the New Testament that are rather enigmatic at first glance, but there is a deeper and much more profound meaning if the passage is reflected on carefully. The fig tree which Jesus “condemned” for not bearing fruit comes to mind. Another instance occurs during Our Lord’s passion: “And when they led Him away, they laid hold of one Simon of Cyrene, coming in from the country, and placed on him the cross to carry behind Jesus. And there were following Him a great multitude of the people, and of women who were mourning and lamenting Him. But Jesus turning to them said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed'” (Luke 23:26-29).

For the next nineteen hundred years, this prophecy had yet to be fulfilled. But in the twentieth century, can it scarcely be argued that the world does not say to her daughters, “blessed are the barren”? In the Christian Church, unnatural birth control had always been condemned. In fact, for 1,930 years the entire Christian Church — both Catholic and Protestant — stood together unanimously condemning unnatural means of birth control. Martin Luther called artificial contraception “sodomy” while John Calvin referred to it as murder. However, when the Church of England finally acquiesced to Sanger in 1930, the gates of hell were flung wide open, and it was only a matter of time until the other Protestant Churches fell on this question as well.

Tykes and the Trinity

The gravity of the situation can surely not be emphasized enough. Indeed, the mere fact that the survival of the human race itself is in question leads one to look to the flagitious spiritual condition of Gaia’s children. St. Paul’s observation in this mammoth battle provides invaluable illumination on this point: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). This spiritual war is not so much man against men, but Satan’s war against God. Humanity represents, in many ways, simply the pawns in a great chess match over the salvation of souls. Lucifer wishes to devour and deprive man of his great destiny which is to enjoy God’s presence forever. Yet, the manner in which he does so has a theological basis to it since his objective is to warp the very essence and image of God Himself.

Christianity understands God in the Trinitarian tradition. The creeds teach that there is one God, but there are three distinct persons in God. Now many people have difficulty in understanding the Trinity which, admittedly, is not the easiest of concepts to grasp, and it goes without saying that we will never be able to comprehend it fully in this life. Nevertheless, it will not do to simply leave the matter there, assigning it exclusively to the ‘mystery’ part of our religion.

The Bible says that man is made in the “image of God.” If we truly are so made, then it follows that we must have individually or collectively a likeness to His Trinitarian essence. Such a similarity is found in the human family itself which approaches the likeness of the Trinity. The Trinity is one just like a family is one. The Trinity consists of three persons as a human family consists of more than one person. The Trinity is ‘of the same substance’ while a human family shares the same substance: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh…” (Genesis 2:23).

There is also another element in the Trinity that lends itself to human likeness. The Nicene Creed professes this about the Trinity: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Now what exactly does this mean? Well, Catholic theology understands the Father as God knowing Himself; the Son as the expression of God’s knowledge of Himself; and the Holy Spirit as the result of God’s knowledge of Himself. The Father ‘looks’ at the Son and the Son ‘looks’ at the Father. They behold in one another their mutual divine goodness and beauty. The love between the Father and the Son “generate” (not create as there is no creation of God) another person, whom we call the Holy Spirit. And so, the Holy Spirit is love “proceeding” or “coming from” the first two persons of the Blessed Trinity.

The human family has, of course, a rather striking parallel to this. The ultimate act of intimacy in a marriage mirrors the eternal procession of the Trinity since the act of love itself “generates” another human being. (Generation is probably even a better term to describe the act than “to create” since humans can create nothing — only God can, and so the analogy is closer to the Trinitarian relationship than one might have originally assumed.)

It is, therefore, not difficult to see that, in many ways, God is a “family of persons,” and the Trinity is not as unfamiliar to us as once believed.

One may inquire what the Trinity has to do with the oppressive anti-life policies of many world governments and international government bodies like the United Nations. If we discern the kind of ideology which Satan has duped humanity into accepting, it quickly becomes apparent that it is an anti-Trinitarian one, represented by divorce, contrception, abortion, and euthanasia. The devil wishes to attack God by attacking the Trinitarian elements of the family. His first success was the slow but certain progress of the eradication of the “severe” divorce laws, thereby undermining the unity of the family. The second triumph involved repealing the “oppressive” abortion laws and promoting the contraceptive mentality, which of course, both serve to block the eternal procession of love which generates another person. In unnatural forms of birth control, not only is this divine procession of love rejected, the fruit of a man and woman’s love, the child, is rejected as well. Finally, the most current assault against the family is to kill the elderly who may be just a little too burdensome. While divorce is an attack on the unity of the family, and abortion and contraception are attacks on the procession of love within a family, euthanasia involves primarily an attack on the person based on his or her utility to the family. This utilitarianism is, of course, the underlying premise behind the Social Darwinist dogma.

Children are indeed the hope and fulfilment in the family and for the world just as the Holy Spirit is the fulfilment of the God-head and the hope for a spiritual re-awakening. There is a saying that “children are God’s way of telling us that the world should go on”, but the converse is true as well: “the attack on life and family are the devil’s way of telling us that the world should NOT go on.” The war which is raging in the world today between those who want to see the dignity and inestimable worth of every person recognized and those who see the human person as merely an utilitarian instrument for self-gratification will continue until the end of the world. There is no reason that it should stop now, it has been going on since the world’s very beginning.

I will put enmities between thee and the woman; and thy seed and her seed: he shall crush thy head and thou shalt lie in wait for his heel (Genesis 3:15).

Author Edwin Black does a wonderful job chronicaling the aberrant history of the eugenics movement from its beginnings with Francis Galton (half-cousin of Charles Darwin)to Margaret Sanger’s “birth control” movement, to today’s promoters of human “genetic engineering” in his book “War Against the Weak.” Black doesn’t go far enough in connecting the dots to today’s ardent “reproductive rights” crowd, and is loathe to even associate the one with the other. But those of us who *know* are able to easily draw the obvious conclusions.
On the other hand, G.K. Chesterton makes excellent arguements against the principles of eugenics (which was all the scientific rage in his day) in his book “Eugenics and Other Evils.” Chesterton fills out the moral dimensions of the eugenic mentality where Black falls short. The two books compliment each other well, like two bookends on a bookshelf.

redwallabbey13

Thank you for an excellent overview of the subject. It is almost a ‘cliff-notes’ of this subject. I’m going to print it out and use it in teaching my older teens about this important subject that has dramatically altered their generation – if only by the number of peers they do not have due to abortion.

James

I wince a little at the idea of an encyclical, especially Humanae Vitae, as being “un-inspired.” Couldn’t it be called “sacred scripture outside of the Canon?”